The Steam Perils of Summer sale is over. Based on what I’ve seen, I’m somewhere in the middle on money spent at $70. For only $10 more than getting a single console game, I now own:

Audiosurf

Beat Hazard

Borderlands + all the DLC

Dawn of Discovery – Venice

Galcon Fusion

Introversion Complete Pack (Uplink, DefCon, Darwinia, Multiwinia)

King’s Bounty: Gold Edition

Supreme Commander 2

Witcher: Enhanced Edition

I’ve been torn about whether or not to get Borderlands since it first launched. As a co-op focused game, I couldn’t decide if I’d end up playing more with Xbox friends or PC friends, plus there’s always GamerScore to think about. At $11 (+$12 for all the DLC), it was just too good of a deal to pass up. Plus, I saw a lot of my Steam friends getting it as well, so I figure there’ll be lots of people to play with.

I already own the original Witcher on DVD, but I bought the Enhance Edition anyway. This was purely out of laziness, now I don’t have to mess with patching the game when I reinstall it find the disc.

SupCom 2 and King’s Bounty are games I’d thought about getting at one point or another. I didn’t have a PC that would run SupCom2 well enough when it came out, and then when I had a PC that would run it, it was too old for me to buy at full price. King’s Bounty was one I wanted to buy when it launched but didn’t because of some DRM or retail issue, I can’t remember at this point.

Of all my purchases, Dawn of Discovery – Venice, was the only game I’d planned to buy soon. I really like Dawn of Discovery for city building, but I was waiting on getting the expansion until I’d finished a few more of my console games.

The rest of my purchases were all impulse buys: Audiosurf, Beat Hazard, Galcon Fusion, and the Introversion games. I’d demoed Audiosurf and Galcon before and liked them, but I’ve been out of a casual gaming mood for a long time now. Still at under $5 for each, they were worth adding to my library for whenever I was in the mood for a quick play session.

I haven’t played all of my purchases yet, but I did want to mention how surprised and thrilled I am with Beat Hazard. I picked this game up because it sounded fun and was only $2.50, but I didn’t expect to play it a bunch. It’s a shooter similar to Geometry Wars, but it uses your music collection to drive the gameplay. Oddly enough, it fills the same gaming niche for me that Rockband 2 does. Rockband is a game I play only once a month or so, but when I do, I play for a couple of hours. It’s a chance to listen to music that I like while also gaming. Beat Hazard is pretty much the same thing, only it’s an Asteroids-like shooter instead of a rhythm game. Unlike Rockband, Beat Hazard is quick to pickup and play for five minutes at a time, and I think it’ll become a part of my regular gaming-life.

So far, I’ve seen that it plays easier with more intense and fuller music. For instance, I played through several tracks of Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree where the guitar, bass, and drums are all playing pretty consistently and didn’t have much trouble keeping up a high level of fire from my ship. I switched to Audioslave’s Original Fire and had some problems. There’s some parts where different instruments drop out, which happened to be when there was a boss ship on the screen.

I wouldn’t call any of it peculiar though. It actually makes for an interesting additional level to the game, where the song you pick affects you’re play strategy. I was actually thinking of trying the Overture from the Barber of Seville as a real challenge, both for length and the variation in volume, tempo, and instrumentation.

Awesome, we now have to play some Borderlands! I did by Champions during the Steam sale, but I have come to the realization that I should have just resubbed, because all the toons I want to create I already have on that inactive account. So there could be some CO in my near future, once my AoC and WoW play time has run out at the end of the month.